OryxAlign’s first acquisition was motivated partly by its desire to “make better use of the money we had sitting in the bank”, its CEO has told IT Channel Oxygen.
The London-based MSP today broke from its organic growth strategy for the first time by snapping up SDT Group.
OryxAlign’s revenues jumped 16% £17.5m in its year to 31 March 2024, with SDT set to push its top line above £20m.
“We’d bid on a couple and changed our minds”
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, CEO Carl Henriksen said M&A was desirable to “keep up the pace of growth”.
“This acquisition was purely off of the balance sheet. We wanted to make better use of the cash we’ve generated from the company,” Henrkisen said.
“We also just wanted to demonstrate that we could do the sourcing, the due diligence and the integration work effectively as a board and leadership team. To be able to make a success of that was quite important to us.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve bid on a couple of companies and changed our mind or pulled out.
“This one came along at the right time, it was the right size, the culture was really good from the start, and there was lots of commonality of platform, tooling and technologies.
“They weren’t massive, but they bring really complementary skills sets with a real focus on client services, which is aligned to us.”
“Go-to provider within datacentre and construction”
Founded in 2006, OryxAlign’s growth has accelerated in recent years amid efforts to push beyond its roots in IT support and into larger datacentre and construction roll outs.
“We want to become the go-to provider within enterprise networks within datacentre and construction,” Henriksen explained.
“Having said that, we’ve had some fantastic wins around our more traditional managed services, cloud transformation business.
“We’ll finish April 2025 well over £20m and have had a fantastic year regardless of the SDT addition.”
“We made the right decision”
Henriksen said he is already confident that OryxAlign made the right call buying SDT, which has offices in Bracknell and Cape Town.
“After we did the deal, I went around to see seven of their top clients – and they were quite substantial clients. I thought ‘gosh, how can a company of that size support a client with hundreds and hundreds of users’, but I was really impressed by the quality of the relationships the clients had with SDT,” he explained.
“That gave me some real reassurance that we made the right decision.”
OryxAlign is looking to complete the integration within “six to 12 months”, Henriksen said.
“There’s a lot of hard work ahead in terms of contractual changes and integrations, which will start in earnest in January or February,” he said.
More M&A is possible, Henriksen indicated.
“Having just completed our first acquisition, there is appetite to look at other ones should they be in the right place at the right time,” he said.
“We’re not a serial acquirer at all – I don’t think we’ll use that methodology – but ultimately there is appetite to continue to scale the business quite aggressively.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
